Posted on 06/05/2019 6:24:22 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
Russia told the West on Wednesday the Normandy landings on D-Day in 1944 did not play a decisive role in ending World War II and that the Allied war effort should not be exaggerated.
Moscow's comments might irk war veterans in Britain where the 75th anniversary on Wednesday of the largest seaborne invasion in history was marked at a ceremony in Portsmouth attended by Queen Elizabeth and world leaders including Donald Trump and Angela Merkel.
Speaking at a weekly news conference in Moscow, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova offered a tribute to those who died on the western front of World War II and said Moscow appreciated the Allied war effort.
"It should of course not be exaggerated. And especially not at the same time as diminishing the Soviet Union's titanic efforts, without which this victory simply would not have happened," she said.
(Excerpt) Read more at themoscowtimes.com ...
What revisionist history looks like
Overstated
The US unlike Russia was fighting on two fronts on opposite sides of the world
The 25 million from the war, plus the 10 to 20 million people killed by Stalin (gulags, forced famines, etc.) - it sure starts to add up.
And how many of the 9 million Soviet military deaths were opposition members leading the charge?
The Soviets if left alone on the continent with the Germans and no outside inputs of technology and food would have managed to lose to the krauts.
There was an enormous part of the German economy that was devoted to countering the western air war. Without that pressure the Germans could have devoted far more resources to defeating the Soviets. It would have been a horrible outcome as they were planning to starve/murder most of the population.
Great read is the book Wages of Destruction.
Agreed. My dad served on the artic convoys to Murmansk. The efforts of the western allies to supply Russia were immense.
Look at the link in my #116. That stuff got there through Murmansk and Iran, and you’re right, it was an immense effort.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact did not come out of the blue. Yes, lots of soviet apologists and supporters in the West were taken by surprise, but as a matter of fact the collaboration between Stalin and Hitler had grown since the early 1930’s. It was a clandestine effort carried out against a background of massive propaganda. Initially the two dictators used each other to eliminate perceived and real internal rivals and enemies. Of course Hitler would never have been able to start his expansion to the east without a tacit approval by Stalin.
Stalin’s machiavellian policies made the world war almost inevitable, and the russian losses should be seen in that light.
After the war most of this history has been hidden, and initially were only retained in autobiographies of people who had been involved in communist movements (eg Arthur Koestler, Mannes Sperber) and of course in the contemporary statements by defectors like Walter Krivitsky.
A good history regarding this time period (1930 -1941) is Double Lives by Stephen Koch. See also Chekisty by John Dziak. And for those who are fond of historical novels Alan Furst’s Dark Star is must read.
Some of the 25 million fought for the Axis as well - especially in Ukraine.
We opened a second front in Italy in 1943 but the losses were too high, so we attacked the less-heavily defended coast of France.
After the Iron Curtain fell, the Russians admitted they’d sent saboteurs and sappers behind the lines in Ukraine to spur German retaliation against the civilian population there (to drive a wedge between them and the Germans they welcomed). It worked, and the relationship soured.
D-Day allowed the Soviets to pare down their army. Without it, their manpower levels were so low they would have collapsed in lare 44 or 45 from lack of food.
German help? They were DESTROYED.
[Far too many Americans have zero appreciation for the size of the Soviet effort, and the weight they brought to the fight. ]
What I find amusing is that prior to WWII, Western Europe tried its hand at being Switzerland once and failed. In the postwar period, it is having another go at being Switzerland. In time, the US will get tired of paying for Europe’s defense, and the Russians will get frisky again. Or the threat could come from a completely different direction. The common thread is that Europe will once again get caught with its pants down.
Islam. "Internal", at least in large part.
Agreed on all the rest.
The USSR couldn’t have been successful without material, munitions, and other aspects of the lease.
And when they were invading Poland they also took Latvia Lithuania Estonia parts of Finland parts of Romania
Sure...well, that probably has something to do with the iron fist used by Lenin and Stalin against the Ukraine. Good gosh, they punitively STARVED the Ukranians to death in their ideological battle against the Kulaks, who refused to collectivize.
So they just starved them.
If I had been a Ukrainian, I might well have sided with the Nazis against the Soviets.
To me, it is astonishing. You hear Russians today, actually hear it, that Stalin’s crimes against his own people are exaggerated and overblown.
I can only shake my head.
Yes...they had a few of the Doolittle Raiders who spent quite some time there, and some B-29 crews (whose planes were disassembled, minutely copied and reversed engineered to produce the T-4 Soviet bomber, which they used into the Sixties.
I never understood that. Why in God’s name did they have to intern the US crews? Ostensibly, they weren’t at war with Japan, that is true, unless you count the interminiable and bloody decade long border clashes in Manchuria between Japan and the USSR, but...we were sending them all that equipment, supplies, and food.
Effing communists.
Sure; no reason they wouldn’t welcome the Germans as liberators...
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